DIRE STRAITS: President Trump conducting diplomacy on social media yesterday dismissed out of hand the Iranian response to a peace proposal. He wrote, “I have just read the response from Iran’s so-called ‘Representatives.’ I don’t like it — TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!” 

  The details of the Iranian response were not made public and Trump did not say what he disliked about it. Oil prices rose on the news.

  Trump and his Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth appear to be stymied by a country they claim to have militarily obliterated.  Iran has Trump in the position of living up to his threat to destroy Iranian civilization or backing down because he over-threatened.

  In an interview with the syndicated news show “Full Measure,” Trump said the US is monitoring sites that contain enriched uranium and “if anybody got near the place, we will know about it, and we’ll blow them up.”  He previously said the uranium is buried so deep under rubble that nobody can get to it. 

  Earlier yesterday Trump was on a Truth Social rant about Barack Obama giving Iran $1.7 billion in cash, so much so that, “Every Bank in D.C., Virginia, and Maryland was emptied out.” Trump wrote that, “For 47 years the Iranians have been ‘tapping’ us along, keeping us waiting, killing our people with their roadside bombs, destroying protests, and recently wiping out 42,000 innocent, unarmed protestors, and laughing at our now GREAT AGAIN Country. They will be laughing no longer!”

SUPREME DISAPPOINTMENT: Trump was on a real social media tear yesterday. He posted a 545 word tirade about Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett ruling that his trade tariffs were illegal. “So bad, and hurtful to our Country,” he wrote. “They were appointed by me, and yet have hurt our Country so badly!” He seems to believe that because he appointed them they should rule in his favor. “I do not believe they meant to do so, but their decision on Tariffs cost the United States 159 Billion Dollars that we have to pay back to enemies, and people, companies, and Countries, that have been ripping us off for years.” 

  Trump complained that, “They could have solved that situation with a ‘tiny’ sentence, ‘Any money paid by others to the United States does not have to be paid back.’” 

 And then he said, “A negative ruling on Birthright Citizenship, on top of the recent Supreme Court Tariff catastrophe, is not Economically sustainable for the United States of America!” 

OUTBREAK: Passengers were unloaded in the Canary Islands over the weekend from the cruise ship hit with three deaths from an infection of hantavirus, the often-fatal disease spread by rodents. One French citizen was reported to have come down with symptoms while being flown home.

  The strain of hantavirus contracted by the passengers is believed to be a rare one that spreads from human to human. 

  Passengers were allowed to bring only a small bag of personal items, including passports and cellphones. Seventeen American passengers were being flown to the Pathogen Treatment Center at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.  One of those Americans tested “mildly” positive.

THE OUTER LIMITS: President Trump on Friday opened some of the government files on suspected alien aircraft … what are commonly known as UFOs, and sometimes “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” … UAPs. With a self-congratulatory social media post he announced, “Whereas previous Administrations have failed to be transparent on this subject, with these new Documents and Videos, the people can decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’”

  Many of the reports are of objects that defy the laws of physics as we know them within the pull of Earth’s gravity. One report from over the Aegean Sea in 2023 described an object making 90-degree turns at a speed of about 80 mph.

  The important thing about UFOs or UAPs is that they are unidentified and no alien craft or life form has been confirmed. Former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called the UFO files a distraction from the Iran war and said: “Unless they roll out live aliens and test demo UFOs or actually admit what we know this really is then I have way better things to do on this Friday.”

INFINITE SCROLL:

— President Trump for Mother’s Day posted his customary poison-pen holiday message that said, “As usual, over 90 percent of Bloomberg Economists (nearly all of whom have a ‘Terminal’ case of TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME!) underestimated the strength of the Trump Economy.” He included a complaint about the departing federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell and the  “America Hating Democrat Party.” 

THE OBIT PAGE: Former Atlanta Braves manager Bobby Cox, who led the team to five National League pennants and a World Series championship in the 1990s, died at age 84. He had been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. 

THE SPIN RACK:  A man who had jumped the security fence Friday at Denver International Airport was killed by a Frontier Airlines jet just about to rotate for takeoff. A fire was sparked in one of the engines, seeming to indicate that the man was sucked into the intake. — Six bodies were found yesterday in a boxcar in Laredo, Texas. The circumstances of the deaths were unknown. — Continuing a grim morning, a 33-year-old man described as a seasoned outdoorsman was killed by a bear while hiking alone in Glacier National Park.

BELOW THE FOLD:  Americans love a good conspiracy theory. About 1 in 4 think the  shooting last month at the White House correspondents’ dinner was staged, with the usual partisan split.

  Roughly 1 in 3 Democratic respondents said they believed the event was staged, compared with about 1 in 8 Republicans, according to the survey published by NewsGuard, a company that rates the reliability of online news outlets. 

  Of course, this is the world in which about a third of Americans believe the 2020 election was rigged.

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